How to Work More Efficiently: The Art of Manipulating Stress

In a world where it’s customary to work eight hours a day, we’ve learned to react frantically in response to stress. Anxiety and depression have become almost synonymous with being “stressed out”, when they are in fact merely symptoms of not being used to stress. There’s no rule that says we have to suffer through a nervous breakdown if we work too hard, yet people keep telling us to take it easy whenever the going gets tough.

The notion that we need to avoid stress is completely wrong. Being able to perform under pressure is the distinguishing mark of the winner. Instead of running away from stress, we need to embrace it and take advantage of the empowering rush. The idea is that you want to be actively seeking stress and tackling it under your own terms rather than waiting for it to hit you in the face.

How does this relate to working efficiently? This is where Parkinson’s Law comes into play. It essentially states that work will expand to fill up the amount of available time. Thus, by decreasing the amount of time you have for a task, you can manufacture stress and finish your work in a fraction of the time. It’s like that cram session before the final exam, where you somehow got through a year’s worth of material in a single night.

You can make use of Parkinson’s Law without procrastinating till the last minute. I do it by setting really short deadlines (preferably a couple days) for whatever projects I’m doing. If it’s something big, I might have to break it down into chunks, but the important part is getting something done very soon. By limiting the available time, not only do I work faster but I also instinctively eliminate on any part of the task that isn’t absolutely necessary. I might add these back later if I feel the need, but it’s important that I don’t get distracted by the lesser components.

Of course, the hard part is sticking to your deadlines. Although the reward/punishment trick is very popular, I find it more effective to prevent myself from being able to work after or during a certain period. For example, I often wake up at 5:30 in the morning to do my schoolwork. Although I don’t wait until the morning of the due date to get it done, I’m still motivated to finish quickly because I know I’ve only got a couple hours to work before I have to go to school. Alternatively, you could commit your spare time to things beforehand so that you’ll have to work faster, or, if you need your computer to work, you could use a program like Freedom to lock your Internet access.